Elon Musk doesn’t mind working marathon hours. Whatever it takes to keep Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter running smoothly, even if he doesn’t always get it. In addition to managing each one of them, the billionaire has time for other chores, like compulsively tweeting from his account or tucking in the new Republican candidate for the White House, Ron DeSantis.
Musk defends that he is able to get everywhere thanks to his organization, as he explained this Tuesday in an intervention at the CEO Council Summit organized by The Wall Street Journal. To questions from journalist Thorold Barker, the magnate pointed out that he himself manages his own agenda most days.
In this puzzle of schedules and meetings, Musk tries to dedicate a full day to each of the three companies, although he acknowledges that this cannot always be the case because unforeseen events arise. He may start at Tesla, but end up at Twitter, immersed in major changes since his arrival.
His secretary helps him out, but “it’s impossible for a person to know what his priorities are.” For this reason, he assumes double work: organizing and directing Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter, although the latter for a short time.
Musk says the problem is the “large number of context switches.” Those setbacks make their workdays endless and their days “long and complicated.” The day ends around two in the morning, when he goes to bed. And he works seven days.
These are not easy times for the American tycoon, who has turned Twitter upside down. First came the staff cuts. Then the failed Twitter Blue launch and all the goings-on with this subscription system. As if that were not enough, Musk has never abandoned the idea that the social network becomes a superapp for everything, in the image of WeChat.
He himself has recognized that he has a lot of work on Twitter. True or not, the billionaire intends to delegate to Linda Yaccarino, the woman who will become the company’s new CEO in the near future.
Few are surprised by Musk’s pace, who has always been a supporter of marathon workdays. “Nobody ever changed the world by working 40 hours a week,” he went so far as to say in 2018, before buying Twitter. At the time, he maintained that 80-hour weeks was ideal.
The tycoon has wanted to transfer these days to his employees. As soon as he landed on the social network, he imposed twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week, according to internal reports revealed by CNBC.
